Technology Post Roundup–8th Edition

In Canada, we’re fortunate to have many community experts and MVPs. Throughout the month, they write about and talk about some really cool things. Many of you have told us that you’d like it to be easier to discover them and what they’re writing about. The team and I will be curating top picks and sharing them with you in frequent technology post round ups.

Windows 8

Windows Store App Development by Laurent Duveau Presenting slides and resources from the full day event in Montreal on Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and Windows Azure.

Quick Start Guide to Windows 8 Finder App Template by Mark Arteaga I recently announced the release of two Windows 8 templates on GitHub. This article will go through a technical overview of the Windows 8 Finder App Template and how to get started with it.

Quick Start Guide to Windows 8 Finder Template Backend Server by Mark Arteaga I recently released two Windows 8 templates on GitHub with an accompanying quick start guide for the Finder App Template. This article will go through the optional NodeJS backend server and how to get started with it and connect it to the Windows 8 template.

Does Your Data Really Belong in Your SQL Database? by Alexandre Brisebois When we move applications to the cloud, there are a few questions that absolutely need our attention. One of these questions comes down to database design. Do you really need all that data in your SQL Database?

Asynchronously Calling REST Services From a Windows Azure Role by Alexandre Brisebois The best practice when it comes to anything going over the network, is to use the The Transient Fault Handling Application Block. The RestClient from this post is a Fluent REST Client that uses the HttpTransientErrorDetectionStrategy and a RetryPolicy to be tolerant of transient faults.

Polling Tasks Are Great Building Blocks For Windows Azure Roles by Alexandre Brisebois Polling Tasks can be used to execute work from Windows Azure Queue Storage Service or from Windows Azure Blob Storage Service. It can also be used to pull work for any external system like from email severs, FTP servers or network drives.

Floor It! Then Kick It Back a Notch by Alexandre Brisebois Performance isn’t about having a huge amount of concurrent threads running in your Worker Role. Its about finding the right balance! So start by taking out all the stops. Push your Worker Roles to their limits. Then taken it back a notch and observe how the Worker Role’s performance is affected. Chances are that your going to notice an increase in the global performance!

Don’t be a Fool Wrap Your Tool! by Alexandre Brisebois The Windows Azure APIs came a long way since they were originally released. On a few occasions, the new versions weren’t very backwards compatible. During those moments, people who use the APIs directly in their code had a tough decision to make. Do we rewrite the code or stay with older APIs?

Defaulting Values in a Multi-Lookup Form in SharePoint by Bil Simser This was a question asked on the MSDN Forums. This post goes more in depth with an explanation and some pretty pictures. The problem was a user wanted to default multiple values in a lookup field in SharePoint.

SharePoint Dev Quick Tip - Quickly and Easily Building SharePoint REST API Query URLs by Rob Windsor Have you ever tried to build the URL for a REST API service call and ended up confused and frustrated? The OData query syntax is well documented, it’s just not that intuitive. Well, if you want to query list data I have a little trick you can use to have the appropriate URL generated for you. Unfortunately this trick doesn’t work with the SharePoint 2013 _api service since it doesn’t expose metadata.

Rangers ship BRDLite (Build-Release-Deploy) by Wes MacDonald BRDLite is the ALM Rangers 1st investment in the DevOps domain which is going to continue to be one of their focus areas in future so stay tuned! Make sure to follow the project.

TFS2012: Create Build Definitions by Ahmed Al-Asaad In this article Ahmed explains how to create a build definition in the Visual Studio 2012 and TFS 2012 server. He uses TFS 2012 Express when he wrote this post.

.NET Programming

The Model-View-ViewModel Design Pattern by Amir Ahani The Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern helps you to cleanly separate the business and presentation logic of your application from its user interface (UI). Maintaining a clean separation between application logic and UI helps to address numerous development and design issues and can make your application much easier to test, maintain, and evolve.

Writing efficient queries with Entity Framework Code First - Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 by David Paquette In this series, we will explore the Social Recipes sample application. This is a simple application that is intended to show some of the common inefficient queries that can be generated using Entity Framework (EF) Code First.

NuGet Tips by David Alpert Using Nuget within a large project is not without it’s risks, so I share the following recommendations in the hopes that it saves someone else some time and trouble.

ASP.NET Web API and Protocol Buffers by Filip W. Protocol Buffers are a super efficient and very flexible way of serializing structured data. Developed at Google, provide the developers lightspeed serialization and deserialization capabilities. There a handful of .NET implementations, the most popular one, called protobuf-net, created by Marc Gravell from StackExchange. On top of that library, WebApiContrib project has a Web API Protocol Buffers formatter ready for you to plug in.

A Comparison of Asp.Net MVC Templates by James Chambers Visual Studio 2012 and the ASP.NET refresh (2012.2) have introduced a number of new and refreshed templates to help bootstrap your project as you turn up a new MVC 4 site. This post breaks down the key items that are in each of the templates to help you get a better understanding of your starting point.

SignalR, ActionFilters and ASP.NET Web API by Filip W. How about, to avoid any controller-level noise, messaging the connected SignalR subscribers from ActionFilters? While this approach might not be applicable in all scenarios, when it is, I think it could provide a nice layer of separation.

Of Interest

Microsoft, .NET and Open Source by David Paquette Microsoft loves Open Source. This was one big take away for me. The folks at Microsoft really are committed to open source. I’m not talking about the old MSPL type of open source you might have expected from Microsoft a few years ago. I’m talking about full on open source.

If you’ve come across a great technology post and think we should share it, please let us know by sharing the post in the Canadian Developer Connection LinkedIn group. Make sure to share how the post helped you get something done. I’m sure your fellow developers would appreciate the insights.